McCarthyism and the Red Scare

For some reason every time we started disguising Mao or Nazi’s(Despite our focus being Asia) and the like my mind kept pulling from what I knew about McCarthy and his campaign in the United States. Mao’s thought police and mass denouncing reminded me of the power McCarthy was able to command because of the fear of communism. According to some evidence, its possible that McCarthy did denounce a few spy’s from the Soviet Union.1 However if you target enough people in politics you’re bound to hit one or two anyway and his success rate of finding spy’s was exceedingly low. As such I would hardly call this a success when compared to the thousands of people he effectively removed.

His hearings were very unorthodox and similar to the circular arguments you can read from Socrates. Asking loaded questions to corner the accused person further allowed him to create fake allegations against mostly leftist parties, “When the accused invoked the Fifth Amendment to protect themselves, McCarthy said this act is “the most positive proof obtainable that the witness is Communist.””2 It wasn’t until McCarthy tried to attack the United States Army that he finally met his match. While his previous actions had lead to a steady decline of power over the ‘Red Scare,’ his battle against Joseph N. Welch ultimately lead to his sudden end of power. 3 However by this point the damage had already been done, even pardons of those wrongly accused did not allow them to reenter the political sphere.

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1-2: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~lillsie/McCarthyism/Victims.html

3: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/joseph-mccarthy-meets-his-match

4: http://cdn.kizaz.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/red-menace-is-real.jpg